LAST week saw the largest industrial action on our railways for more than 40 years. Let us hope that this is the moment the working class in this country realises its strength and power. 

The rail strikes must be the beginning of a mass movement in this country against our broken economic model, which preserves the obscene rich of the few at the expense of the basic necessities of the many. 

I was proud to stand in solidarity with striking RMT workers on their picket lines last week. While every working person regrets the disruption these strikes caused, they were an absolute necessary action of last resort — and therefore the blame can only be with bosses and government, not striking workers. 

The RMT union has been talking to employers and British government ministers for almost two years to find a resolution to the issues involved. 

Indeed, right up until the first strike day, they were engaged in intensive efforts to find a resolution to the dispute, but as well as resulting in no adequate offer on pay or job security, those talks have revealed that the employers have an agenda which will be disastrous for workers and passengers alike.

This agenda includes thousands of job losses, with widespread cuts to station, catering and cleaning staff, cuts to train staff and more driver-only trains and the axing of safety critical track, engineering and operational staff. 

Passengers want more staff, not less. Far from modernisation, the employer’s cuts agenda is a roadmap for the managed decline of our railway which will make services less reliable, safe and accessible — all in order to allow rail companies to continue raking in hundreds of millions of pounds in profit a year. 

Emboldened by over a decade of Tory austerity, transport companies have taken decisions to attack the railway pension scheme, diluting benefits, making staff work longer and making them poorer in retirement, while paying increased contributions. 

They have cut thousands of jobs across the rail network while not giving a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies. They have also cut safety inspections on the infrastructure by 50 per cent in order to facilitate mass redundancies. 

There has also been a sustained attack on terms, conditions and working practices in a form of internal fire and rehire, including lowering existing salaries and increasing the working week. 

During an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, the bosses have also cut real pay through lengthy pay freezes and well below retail price index inflation pay proposals. 

Indeed, a transport worker earning £20,000 per year stands to lose £4,450 in real terms income in just two years under the inadequate proposals — which does not even take into account rising bills and rising National Insurance.

Rail workers were praised as “heroes” by the Transport Secretary for keeping the country moving during the pandemic. Now, despite the extreme cost-of-living crisis, most rail workers are enduring two to three-year pay freezes. 

Since the pandemic began rail bosses have taken home £1 million in pay packets and rail companies have made in excess of £500m a year in private profits. 

The RMT union and its members have been right to stand up to this flagrant injustice, and I stand in full solidarity with them.

Claudia Webbe joins the pickets

It is clear that the Tory government, after slashing £4 billion of funding from National Rail and Transport for London, actively prevented a settlement to this dispute. 

Contrary to its feigned inability to prevent the strikes, the government had a chance to avoid the industrial action. It could have worked with the rail companies to ensure there are no compulsory redundancies of rail workers, that working conditions and jobs are subject to negotiation and agreement with the RMT and that rail workers receive a fair pay rise in line with the rising cost of living. 

Yet instead, it did nothing — except smear the hardworking transport workers as greedy for standing up for a dignified and fair working arrangement. 

Far from the vilification we have seen over the last week from the government and the billionaire-owned press, it is important for us to celebrate everything that the Labour and trade union movement have fought for and won. 

From fairer pay to weekends, everything that makes the lives of workers tolerable has been won by generations of struggle.

Trade unions are the best line of defence against workplace exploitation. Yet the collective ability of workers to organise has been systematically eroded by decades of anti-trade union legislation — most notably the appalling 2016 Trade Union Act. 

The latest Global Rights Index from the ITUC placed Britain among the worst violators of trade union rights in Europe. Poland, Hungary and Belarus are the only other European countries that were classified as committing “regular violations.” 

Forty years ago, eight out of every 10 workers enjoyed terms and conditions negotiated by a trade union. Today, fewer than one in four workers have that benefit. 

Workers’ rights and trade union strength have been under siege since the neoliberal revolution of the late 1970s and 1980s. Arguably the flashpoint for this in Britain was Margaret Thatcher’s war with the National Union of Mineworkers, which caused untold misery to hundreds of communities and ushered in an era of deindustrialisation, regional inequality and needless hardship. 

Worryingly, we currently have a Thatcherite tribute act in No 10. The Prime Minister has echoed Thatcher’s rhetoric, saying the government must “stay the course” and use illegal, temporary contract labour to break the strike. 

It is clear they wish to strike another devastating blow to the labour movement. 

Yet during an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis and with inflation at 9.1 per cent and rising, the highest level it has been for 40 years, the working class of this country have simply had enough. 

They will not take the obscene wealth inequality in this country lying down. Nor will they listen to this government of the super-rich, try to justify the grotesquely uneven wealth of the select few while more and more people struggle to afford the basic necessities upon which they need to survive. 

We know that this government is only too happy to squeeze the struggling many, while allowing the astronomical wealth of the few to continually grow.  

That’s why I am incredibly grateful for the RMT union and its members, for bravely asserting the collective power of the working class. 

We must continue to stand in full solidarity with all striking workers, and to learn from their example with continued trade union mobilisation until every worker in the country has a job upon which they can build a happy and stable life. 

Trade unions are a vital part of our future. The organisation of workers reminds us that it is possible to build a society around the needs of all its citizens and the principles of solidarity.

The road ahead looks long and dark. But if we go down it together, we can, and we will, build a society that works in the interest of all of us, not just a privileged few. Because when working people stand together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish. 

Claudia Webbe MP is the Member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and 
twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe.